


Orbit

by SolarPoweredFlashlight



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 12:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16832227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolarPoweredFlashlight/pseuds/SolarPoweredFlashlight
Summary: When they dated in highschool, Diana was the love of Leona's life - but that was years ago, and she'd managed not to think about Diana in ages until they run into each other as adults and quickly discover the chemistry of ten years ago is still there.





	Orbit

A professor sits alone in her office, nine at night on a Friday. It’s crisp with the threat of winter outside.

She stares at the computer screen, re-reading the sentence for the third time without absorbing any meaning.

The mind wanders. The hand reaches for the phone, screen up in her desk, notification light silent and dim.

In the isolation of her office - a sanctuary, a tomb - she opens the app she keeps buried on a secondary menu, as if anybody will ever see it. Face after face, she brushes her thumb to the left.

She lingers over one.

Long auburn hair, gleaming like sunlight, gleaming like the ghost of cool and promising autumn from so many years ago.

A stranger’s face.

She swipes to the left.

-

Ruddy-faced from the cold walk here, icy with the sweat trapped between her body and her coat, a woman with long auburn hair follows her friend into the bar.

They find a favourite spot, order a favourite beer. They talk shop for the first half a pint - reps, weights, goals, pounds, kilos. Numbers, easy and safe.

“So,” the friend says, her tone sliding from easy and safe and into the promise of new and potentially uncomfortable territory. “What’s eating you?”

“What do you mean?” Leona asks, eyes dropping to her locally brewed stout, dark brown on dark brown.

“You’ve just seemed off today, is all,” Vi remarks casually.

They are silent for a while. Vi has known her for long enough to understand that she is easily broken by long, uncomfortable silence. It works.

“I saw her,” Leona says. “At least I think I did. I never thought I’d see her again.”

“Who?”

“Diana.” 

-

Somebody stupid throws a still-smouldering cigarette butt into a garbage can near the quad across from the library.

Nobody notices the smoke rising from the bin until it’s a proper little flame. The fire department is called, the library is evacuated.

Fucking undergrads, Diana thinks later, when she hears from another professor what started the fire.

It’s all a waste of time, as far as she’s concerned. She and her seminar students stand out in the parking lot shivering alongside the rest of the glut of disgruntled humanity disgorged by the artsy poured concrete building.

A fire truck shows up, the flaming trash can is resolved, and a good hour of her day is gone. (Not that Diana puts a lot of value in hours used for seminars anyways. She is what her frustrated grad students call a “papers prof”, not a “teaching prof”.)

Her colleagues make remarks about sexy firemen being the highlight of their afternoon.

But Diana doesn’t see her, isn’t concerned with what they were doing.

Arms wrapped tight around herself, mind rolling through what she wants to get accomplished after this is all over with, Diana fails to observe the way one of the firefighters does a double-take on their way out, head swivelling to gawp at the platinum blonde professor freezing her ass off in the parking lot.

-

“Thanks mom,” Leona says, holding up the shirt and turning it left and right, admiring the invisibility of the repair job. “Just in time for Jake’s retirement party. I really didn’t want to buy a whole new shirt.”

“Any time at all, dear,” her mother says, the crinkle of her eyes a warm love, a soft love, a love afraid to cling too tightly to this precious adult child and lose her in the grasping.

“It’s late,” Leona’s father says, all moustache, no tact. “You shouldn’t drive back into the city in the dark, it’s supposed to ice over tonight.”

“I know how to drive when it’s icy,” Leona says, with a little laugh.

“Stay,” her mother says. “We could order pizza from the place you like.”

“You can have a beer and watch the rest of the game with your old man,” her dad says.

“Twist my arm, why don’t you,” Leona snorts, conceding and going to the fridge. “What do you want while I’m in here, dad?”

“You know my favourite kind of beer,” he says.

“Cold and free?”

“Cold and free!”

They have pizza and beer, Leona talks about how everyone at the department is doing. They go a whole night without anybody saying anything about biological clocks or meeting nice people. They watch the game, and drink, and it’s nice.

Leona goes up the stairs buzzing slightly, sluggish and full and ready for bed. The texture of the carpet beneath her feet and the banister against her palm seems surreal, a tactile time machine that hasn’t changed in twenty years.

She gets to her old room and suddenly comes awake again. The medals, the trophies, the pennants and posters, all still there, just like she left them when she moved out.

Drawn to a dusty cup that proudly proclaims an accomplishment of a time long gone by, Leona touches a fingertip to its brassy mouth. So much nostalgia, so much paraphernalia. Proof of… something.

Participation, snorts a voice in the back of her mind.

All these souvenirs of a life that seemed so dire, so real, so serious at the time… and yet, nothing on her wall about anything that mattered. Anyone that mattered. It’s all superficial.

Her eyes track across the small room and settle on her wardrobe. Driven by a strange force in her limbs, a stirring lit by the sight of what she swears must have been, could have been, can’t have been -

She slowly opens the wardrobe and her skin breaks out in goosebumps as the smell of her teenage self’s clothing hits her hard and drags her sharply into a very different time in her life.

Her fingers find the striped cuff of her letterman jacket. She rubs the fabric thoughtfully. As Leona remembers with perfect clarity the sight of bleached white hair pouring over the collar, slender fingers poking out the ends of the too-big jacket, whatever surge of energy possessed her drains out just as suddenly from the soles of her feet.

She’s so tired. She needs to sleep.

-

“Tell me again what happened with you and her?” Vi asks, brows furrowing as she takes a thoughtful sip of her IPA.

“She got expelled, while we were dating. My coach took me aside and told me all these things Diana had done, all these rules she’d broken. Breaking into teachers’ work email accounts, trying to dig up dirt on the administration. Something like that. I trusted my coach, and when he said Diana had totally gone off her rocker, I believed him. When I tried to reason with her and get her to see their side of things, see that they had a totally justified explanation for expelling her, she broke up with me. And that was it. All contact cut off.”

It sounds so simple, so clean-cut. The idea of summarizing that crazy, emotional month in just a few sentences seems, somehow, like a betrayal of her younger self - a betrayal of her own lived experiences, the intensity and validity of that whole ridiculous clusterfuck.

“Damn,” Vi says, in a way that makes it clear she doesn’t understand why Leona would be at all interested in ever reconnecting with that old flame. Or at least Leona thinks she doesn’t understand, until she sighs and shakes her head, then says, “There’s just something about the first person you ever really loved, huh?”

Leona huffs, takes a drink, doesn’t answer.

Maybe she underestimated Vi. Maybe she understands a little too well.

It can be easy to forget sometimes that her workout buddy is a detective by profession.

-

A professor of ancient Greek history and a professor of biology walk into a late night yoga studio attached to a 24 hour gym.

Here’s the punchline: long auburn hair pulled back into a messy, sweaty ponytail, seen from across the room, and a burst of distinctive laughter, felt from across nearly two decades.

Zyra just barely convinces Diana not to walk out then and there.

But she’ll never come back here. She can’t.

She’ll find a new yoga studio.

-

And here she is again, at eleven at night, flipping through her phone.

Left swipe.

Left swipe.

Left swipe.

Left swipe.

Left swipe.

-

She goes back to the yoga studio. And then, well, it’s basically inevitable.

“Diana?”

Her heart stops.

Diana turns.

She tries to remember who she is now. A respected authority in her field. Vindicated, syndicated, cited all over the world of academia.

“Leona,” she says, and she’s sure that was all just a fever dream, and she’s sixteen again.

She wants to be angry, even after all these years. To cling to that old betrayal, hung on the wall of her heart to gather dust. But oh, lord, the years have been good to Leona, and she looks so damned vulnerable.

It takes some awkward fumbling, but coffee happens.

It has to be coffee, and not drinks. She doesn’t want to know what would happen with a few glasses of wine and the ambrosia of memory, mingling together so sweet at her lips.

But oh, how they’ve both changed.

And oh, how they haven’t, at the same time.

-

“Let’s get you home,” Leona says, handing Diana her coat. They’re smiling, although Leona feels a little guilty to have stayed so late. There’s nobody else left in the restaurant, and the employees have blown out every candle but the one still flickering determinedly at their table.

Diana makes a noise of disgust as she hauls herself up into the passenger side.

“I don’t understand how you can drive this boat of an SUV,” she teases, and Leona just smiles as she slides into the driver’s seat and buckles herself in.

“You’re safer in a collision if you’re sitting higher up,” Leona says, turning the ignition. “If you get into an accident in a little sedan - “ like Diana’s small, practical little silver Saab, which is rapidly becoming more difficult to source parts for “ - you’re more likely to get badly injured or killed.”

“So you’re definitely not compensating for anything with the size of this beast, then,” Diana chuckles.

“No,” Leona says, sliding her ‘beast’ out of the tight parking spot. “I got more than enough machismo in the army, thanks.”

There’s a brief quiet, and if the air between them is cold that’s only because the engine hasn’t warmed up enough to produce any decent sort of heat.

“So you did end up enlisting after all, then?” Diana asks, softly, looking at her hands. Leona focuses on the road, resisting the urge to look at Diana’s hands with her.

“Right out of highschool,” she confirms, throwing a glance over her shoulder before turning out of the plaza. “I didn’t last long, though. I got through training, did the bare minimum, finished my two years, then came back and got my position with the fire department here.”

“What made you come back here, though? It could have been a good opportunity to move, to go to somewhere like maybe the west coast.”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Leona says, coming to a gentle stop at a red light.

“I did, though,” Diana says. “Between my three degrees I’ve lived in three different countries in the last ten years. It’s just a coincidence that I ended up back so close to where I grew up.” She loosens the pale gray scarf around her neck a little as the car starts to warm up. “With the academic world, if a position opens up that suits your qualifications and the focus of your research, you have to be prepared to move anywhere.”

“You’re not on trial,” Leona says lightly, flashing Diana a smile before she turns her attention back to the light, which has turned green. “I believe you.” She shifts gears between them, a clunky and old-fashioned movement that seems easy and practiced in her capable hands.

Another small silence, and then Leona says,

“I’m glad. I’m really glad we happened to end up meeting again.”

Diana huffs a little laugh.

“What?” Leona demands, grinning a little.

“You always were the sappy, optimistic one.”

They drive past Diana’s house, cold and unloved and unlived in. Caught up in conversation, peeling back the layers of the adults they’ve become and delighting in the discoveries they find there, they don’t notice until Leona has subconsciously started driving to where Diana’s parents used to live, all those years ago.

The conversation is too good to end here, they decide.

They drive from the city out to the suburbs, take a midnight tour around the field upon which Leona once won her teenage glory.

By four in the morning they’re at a Denny’s drinking coffee and sharing an order of pancakes, still talking.

Leona returns Diana reluctantly to her home around seven in the morning.

“Would it be okay if I kissed you?” Leona breathes, lingering in the hollow of Diana’s front entrance, her exhaled words coiling and captured in the chilled October air - hope, crystalized.

“I wish you would,” Diana says.

Right, Diana thinks in her giddy, sleep-deprived mind as Leona leans in and kisses her on the stoop of her apartment. I’m swiping right on this one.


End file.
